Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker with sonnets in magazines like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of twelve books of poetry including Dewy Decimals (Arkay Artists 2020) and Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press 2020) Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website http://kristingarth.com

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Spectrophilia

You never were alone in life. A doll
dissected with a pearl handled knife — held,
allotted days inside crocheted shawl, all
communal gifts since you were small. She fell

into an early grave, the half of you
who won’t be saved. A heart conjoined
severed by rot, you stalk in holes dug, new,
the family burial plot. Adjoined

Jason D. Ramsey resides halfway between Detroit and Chicago, and serves as the publisher/editor-in-chief of Barren Magazine and Barren Press. His poetry and essays can be found or are forthcoming at Parentheses Journal, After the Pause, Rhythm & Bones: Dark Matter, and more. Find him on social media @JasonDRamsey.

\—

cider press

we skipped in circles & tiptoed over rinds. we stirred
straw & pomace with wooden pestles, back & forth,
like oars in rainwater – air sweet with galas, tart from

pink ladies, ripe as orchards lathed in rows. floodlights
danced at nightfall. barn skin splayed gray & faded,
dry as poplars before first snow. death became a

David Spicer is a former medical journal proofreader. He has published poems in Santa Clara Review, Synaeresis, Chiron Review, Remington Review, unbroken, Third Wednesday, Yellow Mama, The Bookends Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, The Midnight Boutique, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart once, he is author of one full-length poetry collection, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke’s Press) and six chapbooks, the latest of which is Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress), released in September 2019. He lives in Memphis.

…

g h o s t a p p l e s

for Brenda Landman

Look ice hostages
trees their frigid hotels
Stop for a moment at least

The Arctic air their host
At some point their fruit plops
from the bottom holes

serve as clear round gates
for mush that drops steals
into snow vanishes into the past

Breathe slowly and hope
you catch them before it’s too late

after Terrance Hayes

VACATION

My father squeezed my neck until I turned blue,
and my mother smashed his head with her Sunday purse.
She bought me a Greyhound ticket to my grandparents’
trailer park in Rapid City. For ten months, my grades
blossomed, and I listened to my grandmother berate
my grandfather: You and that Jackie Gleason fatso fool
are two buzzards of the same feather. I smiled at my
grandfather, tall and quick as an aging basketballer.
All he’d say was, Aw, shut up, Millie, and cook supper,
and kept watching The Honeymooners or Twilight Zone.I’d like to see men try having babies, she’d continue.
My grandfather’d say, Let’s take a walk, son. I’ll teach
you to shoot snooker. I could have listened to them forever,
but my father drove a thousand miles to father me again.
…

Henry Brown is a student and activist from Austin, Texas currently involved with the Democratic Socialists of America at Carleton College, where he is a junior-year Religion major/Spanish minor. He has previously published poetry in Wax Poetry & Art’s Eleventh Transmission and has a poem forthcoming in Bitchin’ Kitsch.

Instagram: @henry_d_brown

~~~~~

earthward

weight of a water-wheel, filling and spinning
pinning down for good me &
the old priest with his bucket

one milligram and half, twice daily with food
strewed across the laundry room: urgent!
sins of a nation left between pairs of socks

fifty milligrams at night, dead priest sidles off somewhere
are you there? i thought i could cry out
each soft-shadow glance at your face

were we there? keep it down! milligram and a half!
now laugh! caged cockatiel keeps count on the perch
of every ghost here that burns the roof of your mouth

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in
That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work
upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie
Review and failbetter.

\/

FARMER AND PALEONTOLOGIST

Man’s digging for bones
in a field in a corner of Nagy’s farm.
Not the ribs of cows
poking through their leather vests
but the remains of ancient creatures.
He’s a paleontologist
not some guy who’s having a hard time
remembering the last time it rained.

But what’s Nagy to do?
This professor
is paying him good money
which is more than he can say
for his scrawny cattle.
The possibility of a wool-less
woolly mammoth
is keeping his family fed.

Life’s not working out
for those making their living off the land.
So maybe it’s the turn
buried somewhere below
where old man Nagy’s standing.

The professor’s found some kind of skull
and he’s celebrating.
Nagy learns there’s joy to be had in the dead.
But the dying’s another story.

GJ Hart currently lives and works in London and has had stories published in The Molotov Cocktail, The Jersey Devil Press, the Harpoon Review and others. He can be found arguing with himself over @gj_hart.

/

My Luxuries

Please forgive me
My needs, these luxuries
Tipped by bitten
Wind and brash – also please,
The Finnish weave,
And stainless complications
That tend my materials.
You could not know!

But do,
How I cram them,
Or pile them at the strand,
But understand the intruder
Still intrudes
And the moon’s
Miry lash
Does as it will.

I Remember a city
Like me, content
To offer a hand
Across rag
Papered Breaks, to divy
Notes and rises,
Until nature’s table
Spun and winds
Coxed me
Down roads jammed
With talk Of filthy coups
And vitamins.

And I felt again –
Like a child, not thrilling
But poorly sewn
And belly stuck,
And without a penny’s
Choice demanded,
I wave goodbye
To the never
Always treasured things
Forever.